Story by Megan Mullen, Contributors: Georgina Parker, Tyler Griffin, Laura Dalton
A group of Indigenous women shared their stories of injustice at the one year commemoration of Walking With Our Sisters art installation, held at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) Library Thursday night.
The installation is comprised of 1,763+ pairs of moccasin vamps – plus 108 pairs of children’s vamps – each pair representing one missing or murdered indigenous woman and each children’s pair is dedicated to children who never returned home from residential schools in both Canada and the US.
Multiple volunteers and community members took the microphone at the event to share stories from their comm
unities and what Walking With Our Sisters meant to them.
Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing, a Métis Anishinaabe PhD student in social justice education at OISE, is a volunteer with Walking With Our Sisters.
“It’s hard to name positive outcomes of WWOS because it is a funeral,” said Beaulne-Stuebing as she emotionally talked about the injustices faced within the indigenous community, “(these) are lives we just shouldn’t have lost.”
“We don’t get a lot of spaces to grieve and mourn. It’s only possible because thousands of hours of labour made that possible” Beaulne-Stuebing said.
In June of 2012, a Facebook post asked for people to create moccasin tops (vamps) for the Walking With Our Sisters exhibit and by July 25, 2013, the organizers had received over 1,600.
The installation, commemorated those in the Indigenous community who were stripped of their chance to be mourned, began touring North America in 2013 and visited Toronto from Oct.15-22, 2017 – a little over a year ago.
Terry Swan
, deputy director of Aboriginal Initiatives and Education at Right to Play also spoke at Thursday’s event, sharing her own story of being taken from her community at the age of three and not being returned home until she was in her early twenties.
Swan, like the other speakers of the night, emphasized how important Walking With Our Sisters is to highlight injustices within indigenous communities.
“Spirit never dies,” Swan closed out the event with, “the most important thing that we have is our spirit and spirit never dies.”
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